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Oct 3, 2006

"We'll do everything we have to do to try and retain the license," KOCE President Mel Rogers tells the Los Angeles Times, reacting to Gov. Schwarzenegger's veto of a bill designed to end the legal wrangling for control of the station.

When her preschooler began humming the jingle from a McDonald's commercial, Cleveland pediatrician Susan Connor decided to analyze the sponsorship spots that surround TV shows for tots. She found that fast-food companies are the predominant sponsors of preschool fare on PBS Kids and the Disney Channel, both of which "promote themselves as ad-free," reports the Associated Press. The study, published this month in the medical journal Pediatrics, concluded that the ads targeting preschoolers on Nickelodeon and sponsorship messages on PBS and Disney "took similar approaches and used similar appeals, seeming to promote the equation that food equals fun and happiness." [abstract]

John Whiting reviews Uneasy Listening, Matthew Lasar's latest chronicle of the battles within Pacifica Radio. "As the backroom plots continually recycle, the story begins to read like an endless reality-TV pirate game in which the protagonists are made to walk the plank and then try to get voted back on board," he writes.